There are actually many ways to write in Chinese, some using the complicated characters you may be familiar with, and others using alphabets like the one we use in English. To answer your question, I’ll give you four of them:
1) Traditional characters
The way the Chinese language(s) is transcribed has slowly evolved over time, starting with more simplistic pictographs to the full array of characters used today.
Since the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, people have used more or less the same characters to write down Chinese sounds.
The more complex characters known as “traditional characters” are mostly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and in many Chinese language classrooms.
Chinese characters are syllabic, which means that each character represents a certain syllable sound and its meaning, such as zhōng (中, middle), shì (是, to be), or rén (人, person).
Syllables themselves can be distinguished both by their phonetic sounds and their tones (Mandarin has four tones, plus a neutral tone). This means that shì (是, to be) and shí (十, ten) are completely different words because they have different tones, and they are thus represented by different characters.
Two words with the exact same sounds and tones may also be represented by different characters because they have different meanings.
The characters themselves may look complicated, but many of them recycle the same strokes and components. For example, dà (大, big)contains the character rén (人, person), for one looks like a person walking with two legs, while the other looks like the person with arms stretched out (therefore looking “bigger”).
If you look at characters closely, you’ll notice many similarities. For example, shì (是, to be) and míng (明, clear) have the same radical (a component with a specific meaning) rì (日, day/sun). As you can see, sometimes the connection is clear—other times, not so much.
2) Simplified characters
While traditional characters are older and often taught in language classrooms, most of China uses simplified characters, which for the most part look like traditional characters except for some modifications. It actually became China’s official script due to the Chinese government in the 1950s and ’60s.
Sometimes the difference between traditional and simplified characters is easy to get adjusted to. For example, the simplified character for mā (马, horse) looks much like an easier-to-write version of its traditional counterpart (馬).
Other times, though, simplified and traditional characters bear little resemblance, like gè (个 or 個, common counting word). However, if you already know traditional characters, it’s easy to adapt to the simplified script.
3) Pinyin
So far, you’ve seen me use a method of transcribing Chinese sounds using the Latin alphabet. This system is called pinyin, and while there have been several ways of writing down Chinese phonetically, this is currently the most standard.
While a Chinese person would not actually write in pinyin, it’s a helpful tool for knowing how to pronounce characters and for texting or typing in Chinese (keyboards can convert pinyin into their corresponding characters).
If you want to know how to perfectly pronounce pinyin, however, you’ll need to start studying Chinese sounds. While the system is extremely consistent and logical, its letters might not sound how you expect. For example, the letter “x” sounds like an “sh” in English, and the letter “c” sounds like an aspirated “ts.”
Pinyin also makes use of four different tonal markers: ¯, ´, ˇ, and `. Once again, the tones will only make sense once you study them, but they do look the way they sound.
4) Bopomofo/Zhuyin
This last writing system is an alphabet with many names, such as “Bopomofo,” which is like saying “ABC” in Chinese, and Zhuyin. It’s mostly used in Taiwan as a way of transcribing Chinese sounds, just like pinyin. While I personally don’t know much about this script, you can look at this chart, which shows each letter and the sound it represents.
There’s so much more to learn about Chinese writing systems, including their history, structure, and how to actually read/write with them, but hopefully this gives you a nice introduction!
